This Fish Needs A Bicycle

absence makes

“When did you get that freckle on your eye?”

I laugh and hug her. How had she even taken a good look at me? She’d climbed out of her responsible silver four-door (the Ford Ranger of our college days long since traded in), handed me the baby and at once took stock of three years change. My hair is longer I have a freckle on my left eye.

She is still the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen up close.

“I am so glad to see you.” Over the two days we spend together, I will say it at least dozen times -- in between exclamations of how ridiculously gorgeous her child is. Those eyes! That laugh! Those ears! Are you sure he’s yours?

***

I hitch my skirt between my knees (the better to reach the clutch, my dear) and drive out to her home in the desert near the West Mountains. Instantly domesticated, I change diapers and mix rice cereal while she makes last-minute preparations for tonight’s show. Her husband’s band is opening for LeAnn Rimes, and the missus is a whirlwind of cowboy boots and diaper bags. In her father-in-law’s suite at the venue, we will link arms and sing along, Amber using an Evenflow baby bottle as a mic.

***

“What perfume do you wear now?”

In the quiet of the post-concert car ride, a tuckered out babe sleeps in the backseat, while we do some more catching up. What perfume? It’s so like Amber to want to know the details. There’s absolutely no tedium to her questioning, though, and in the twelve years we’ve been friends, I have never been able to help but gorge myself on her attention. Making people feel wanted is her talent.

She wants to know about subways and parties and shopping. I want to know about childbirth.

“I was so scared, Heather. I cried all the way to the hospital, that’s how scared I was.”

Then we spend the rest of the ride playing Remember When. The time we drove to Vegas for just for a burger. The time I tortured her OCD boyfriend by stepping on his shoes. The only time we ever fought in college.

When we get home, we retire to the office at the front of the house (it’s fairly safe to say that there were more rooms in her home than total square feet in my apartment). I download photos of the baby (it’s the closest I’ll come to smuggling him home with me) and chat with Wes while Amber flips through an Avon catalog. I tell Wes about my envy of the house in the desert, my shame at knowing the words to at least four LeAnn Rimes songs, and all things Amber.

“How old is Manber?”

I relay his question and Amber crinkles her nose and laughs. Manber! She can’t wait to call her husband that when he gets home. Later, he will ask if Manber is good enough for my best friend. I’ll think about the morning I left, Manber looking up from the Sunday paper when he overhears us talking about my brother’s truck. I tell him about the funny sound and the acceleration problem. We talk diagnosis and I smile, remembering what it’s like to date men who know practical things. He tells me to call if I have problems on the way home. He then prods Amber into visiting New York in the fall.

“Oh yes,” I'll tell him. “He’s good enough. He’s wonderful.”

***

There isn’t a big production when we say goodbye that morning. I kiss the baby, blow a raspberry on his belly for good measure and hug his mother. I should have hugged her harder, because the instant my door is closed, I miss her intensely.

***

I’ve always been of the mind that absence – unlike the saying – does not make the heart grow fonder, so much as it makes people forget. People become ideals or demons – the reality of a person blurred by hours, years and miles between them. Meaning gets lost, too. But on my ride back to the southern valley on Sunday morning, I changed my mind. If I’d put Amber on a pedestal all these years, I’d found no reason to take her down from it. Our friendship had not rusted at all over time. I guess I realized that, for people who really matter to each other, absence makes no difference whatsoever.

Posted by This Fish at August 10, 2005 07:56 AM